there's nothing left to beg for
by Lady Shaye
Summary: It was inevitable, she thinks. / OR, where pretty much everybody is killed off. T/C, K/C, a little hidden D/C, S/E, D/E, J/B. Major character death.


Title taken from _You're Not Sorry_ by Taylor Swift.

Disclaimer: I don't own VD and it makes me cry everyday. Are you happy now?

A/N: Um, ok, yeah, I haven't uploaded in WEEKS and I can fully explain WHY: my computer broke. My phone broke. I can't upload anything. I have my best friend in the whole wide WORLD to thank for this, because she's letting me use her laptop in order to upload this. I have a million more things to upload but I don't have them on hand, so, I'm sorry if you want something but you're just not going to get it for a long while. *sobs* I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I wish I could.

Yeah, so, my best FF friend EVER, _pariswindspeed_, requested a VD happy fic. This is what I came up with. I'm sorry, sweetie. I really AM writing more happy fics, but I swear I just haven't finished them yet. Um, I dedicate this to, uh...nobody, really. I wouldn't wish this depressing thing on anybody.

Summary: It was inevitable, she thinks. / OR, where I pretty much kill everybody off. T/C, K/C, a little hidden D/C, S/E, D/E, J/B.

* * *

When he catches them—and it was inevitable, she thinks—he locks them all up in a cellar. Oddly anticlimactic, and rather cliché, she thinks, having been captured more than once in her life. The humans (Bonnie, Jeremy, Elena, and Liz) are separated from the three vampires by strong metal vervain-soaked bars so that they can see each other, but the vampires can't reach and kill them.

They definitely normally wouldn't, but he _starves_ them.

He feeds the humans every two days or so, but vampires can go pretty much forever without blood, so he leaves them alone. But it hurts like hell, her dry and empty veins tightening all across her body, clenching and spasming and pressing for blood that she cannot get.

Tyler winces to see the girl that he loves moaning in pain, and calls her name. "Care—"

"—please," she interrupts. "Just don't. If you keep talking, it just…makes it worse."

They stay mostly silent after that.

* * *

There are only so many ways to kill someone, Caroline muses, and wonders how he is going to go about doing it.

Nothing can prepare her.

* * *

He kills Elena first because he knows it will tear them all apart the most.

Her screams die in her throat as he rips her heart out. Her legs and arms are covered in scratches and blood and bite marks, caused by _hours_ of torture. Her face is frozen in horror and pain, and she dies with Stefan's name on her lips, as always.

Bonnie sobs into Jeremy's shirt, and he cries messily into her hair as well. Liz is in shock, shaking uncontrollably. (Caroline wishes she could hold her, but then again, were she close enough to her mother, she'd probably take a bite out of her. She hasn't fed in weeks.) Tyler is shaking as well.

Damon is silent, but she sees him crying, and the tears he lets slip make her heart ache all over again. Stefan curls into her arms and weeps, and she lets him. Somebody has to hold him.

She herself is crying too, but not as hard as she expected. (Perhaps she's saving her tears for later.)

Klaus peers at them through the bars of their underground cells, standing over Elena's still-warm dead body. He'd dragged her out of the humans-only cell hours ago and started hurting her before their very eyes.

And now she's dead.

The Original holds the bloody heart out to her and the Salvatores in their vampires-only cage, the romanticized organ lying in his outstretched palm, and gestures to the heartbroken brothers. "Which one of you wants it now?" Klaus asks, holding the heart out high, symbolically.

Damon snarls through his silent tears. Klaus ponders his next victim.

* * *

Bonnie is next. When Klaus pulls her out, Jeremy starts sobbing. This is, what, his third girlfriend he'll have lost because of the supernatural world? Besides, he lost his sister just yesterday.

Stefan is still clinging to Caroline when it happens. Klaus takes Bonnie, ties her up, gags her, kisses her once on the cheek, then snaps her neck very casually with a smirk. Bonnie collapses, her eyes already fluttered closed, and Jeremy sobs aloud once. Tyler tries to pat his back, but Jeremy pulls away. Finally, Liz tugs him into her embrace, and Jeremy lets go, having lost both his girlfriend and his sister in the short span of two days.

Damon is still catatonic-like, as he has been for the past twelve-or-so hours (it's downright _impossible_ to tell time down there) but Stefan merely burrows further into her arms, still whispering _Elena_ over and over and _over_ again.

Caroline thinks that she should be crying more, having lost both of her two best friends in the whole wide world in just two days.

Maybe she's in shock. But she can't really tell.

She's _thirsty_, goddamnit.

* * *

He waits a week, comes back down to their prison, and tosses three blood bags in one cell and three sandwiches in the other. She's ashamed to admit it, but she and Stefan fight over one of the bags while Damon—_Damon_, the ever-alive, ever-fighting one of them all—simply quietly takes his bag and starts sucking on it. She lets him have it—starved and young and heartbroken, she's _still_ stronger than Stefan—and devours hers.

What is this? Some kind of final feast? A last meal?

In a way, she wishes that he would just get _on_ with it, get it over with soon.

* * *

Next is Jeremy. Of course. She should have known. He is hurting the most openly (Stefan has come unglued from her side now, _oh joy_!) and the teenager's sobs are probably annoying Klaus even from upstairs. For Klaus, that's enough to kill him faster than scheduled.

It's early morning, probably dawn, she thinks, because she can hear the birds singing upstairs and outside of the house Klaus uses as his refuge and his prison. It seems like a different world.

The Original stalks downstairs, his mood darkened by Jeremy's sobs, his face the slightest bit irritated (she's amazed he even shows that much, smug little expressionless bastard), and he pulls Jer out of the cell and onto the dirt floor. (God, it's so unoriginal she can barely stand it, even now, when she's sure she can stand nothing more or she will break down.) Jer is stunned by this suddenness and does not have the time or the mental function required to react when Klaus bites his own wrist and forces the blood down his throat.

Jer's eyes widen and then his neck is snapped.

Caroline cringes—they all do, except for Damon—but then again, they all know what comes next.

He wakes not even twenty minutes later and Klaus forces a vial of human blood, produced from his jeans pocket, down his throat before he can fight back. Klaus walks away, picks up a flamethrower as Jeremy transitions into full vampire mode, hungry and desperate and scared.

(She remembers Jeremy following her, Bonnie, and Elena around when they were younger, when he wore footie pajamas and she chased him across the yard, the day he showed her the sketch he had drawn of her. Memories, burning and fading and paining her all at once. A sharp pang in her stomach. A throb in her chest where her heart no longer beats. _Pain_. _Knowledge_. Synonyms, now.)

Jeremy locks eyes with her, the closest thing to a sister that he has left, and then Klaus sets him on fire.

* * *

Next, Klaus chooses Stefan. Out of all of them, he is probably the most torn up. He let go of Caroline two days ago, but he's still clinging to her hand as though his life depends upon it.

Damon's expression when Klaus pulls Stefan out of the cell can only be described as heartbroken. (Knowing what must happen, but still hanging onto the hope that his brother might be saved. Hopes dashed, wishes destroyed.) Tyler stares in horror as he and Liz attempt to look away, but fail.

Caroline only starts to cry when Stefan's fingers are ripped away from hers.

God, how could she have _wished_ he'd get it over with?

Klaus drags Stefan, weak from little blood, out of their little cell, and Damon, hissing as his wrists hit his vervained chains (they touch them all time, just by shifting around, but it can't be helped), struggles to save his brothers. But no one has the energy, or the power.

And besides, an aching knowledge presents itself: they all know that he can't be saved.

A croak-scream-moan escapes Damon's lips when the first stake pierces Stefan's skin. His knee, to be exact, so that he can't run away. Not that he has the strength to do so, anyway. He wouldn't be able to even if he didn't have wood in his leg.

Caroline moves closer, drawn to the bars by an irrefutable, undeniable urge to try and _save him_. Damon gives a fierce cry when a stake pierces Stefan's skull. He's a sobbing, having mess by then, and he keeps breathing out, "I'm sorry, I'm _sorry_," as the stakes hit Stefan everywhere, from his furrowed, tired brow to his screaming mouth to his forcibly-twisted ankle.

Klaus stabs every bit of Stefan's body, and breaks every bone. At this point, hours have passed, she thinks, or maybe just several incredibly long minutes. She has made Damon huge her, and now he's clinging to her by—well, not choice, it's more like desperation—necessity. His tears have soaked her shirt, making it a darker blue, just like his eyes (which are now cloudy and broken and swollen, just a little bit).

Klaus waits until there is no space left on Stefan's body untouched by his stakes, except for the space where his heart rests. Then he waits. Making them all anticipate it in dread. Making them all hurt over it.

(Stefan's screams remind her so much of Jeremy's and Elena's, and her throat aches because she hasn't spoken in days, has barely even cried, can hardly even breathe.)

Damon clings and clings and whispers his apologies over and over again into her neck. But she knows he means them for Stefan.

Stefan murmurs a quiet, hoarse, "I'm sorry, too," before Klaus plunges a stake into his chest, makes it brush against his heart. He shudders, turns pale gray and then pure white, and then Klaus moves the stake and Stefan is still and ashy. Damon makes a low, almost murmured screeching noise in the back of his throat.

He drags St—_the corpse_—away, as he always does, and takes the body upstairs to dispose of it somehow.

Damon has been fully brought out of his comatose state, and he won't stop crying. The sobs are quieter and a little bit harsher, but nonetheless, still very much there. He curls a little farther into her embrace, his arms so tight around her that, were she still human, she wouldn't be able to breathe. (As it is, she cannot, won't, might never again, anyway.)

She never thought she would pity Damon Salvatore.

But she does. And she can't even bring herself to cry anymore.

* * *

Tyler is next.

Klaus pulls him out of the cage, despite Liz's pathetic, almost-nonexistent attempts to stop him, save Tyler, save them all…whatever. Anyway, it doesn't work, not that it ever could have. A weak, dehydrated human against a million-year-old Original hybrid? Ha. (Except it could _never_ ever be funny, she thinks.)

He doesn't struggle, like Caroline thought he would. (He's always been _so_ strong.) Instead, he just locks gazes with her, his eyes conveying things he himself will never again say. Tyler just looks at her. His eyes are plain and simple and brown, and she loves those eyes like she loves—_loved_, the cold, clinical, detached part of her brain registers through the mess of pain and grief that lingers everywhere else in her head (and it will never fade away, she thinks)—Bonnie and Elena and Stefan and Jeremy.

(She hopes she's next. Even with Damon clinging to her, depending on her more than he would ever care to admit, even with her mother right across from her, even as Tyler's eyes bore so beautifully into hers, she wishes that she'll be next.)

Losing her friends has made her a completely different person.

Dark. Empty. Aching. (The hurt will never go away.)

She dreads to think what Tyler sees in her eyes, staring back at him. She dreads to think that perhaps he only sees fear and pain and anger and emptiness, instead of the all-encompassing, sweeping-over love and comfort and reassurance that he so desperately deserves. (But she can't bring herself to break the eye contact, no matter what he might see in her blue orbs.)

Klaus pulls Tyler's face by the chin until Tyler is forced to look away and meet his eyes. Brown-almost-black on golden-honey-brown. Pain and acceptance on self-assurance and knowledge. A blank, carefully schooled empty expression on a confident smirk.

Caroline closes her eyes. Waits.

Then reopens them to the sound of Klaus's voice. "In the eyes, Tyler," he commands, then compels him: "Yes, that's right. Take my hand. Good. Now look at Caroline. Right in the eyes. Don't look away. Yes."

She _has to_ meet Tyler's stare, eyes boring into hers, dark brown on light blue. His pupils swallow most of the color, and in the dimmed light of the dungeon, despite her supernatural vision, she can barely see where the black ends and the brown begins. She wonders, and decides that Liz must hardly see anything at all except perhaps a little shape and a tiny amount of color.

Tyler doesn't blink, doesn't look away, doesn't _move_ even as Klaus whispers into his ear.

"Now take my hand and plunge it into your chest, because I want you to _make_ me tear your heart out. Do it now."

She can't look away. She can't breathe. She can't freaking _think_.

Klaus's hand comes out of Tyler's chest bloody and holding something small and pinkish. He pries Tyler's limp hand from its grip on his, and leaves the corpse there. He goes upstairs and comes back down with his hands freshly washed and dried of blood and without a heart in his palm. Then he drags the body away.

Damon whispers words into her ear, as does Liz, and it's probably supposed to comfort her, but it doesn't and it never will and she can't even bother to listen. She cannot even want to be consoled.

It's like all of these reasons for grieving are now all piling on top of her. Bonnie, Elena, Stefan, Tyler.

_God, she hopes she's next._

* * *

It's Liz.

Her mother.

The woman who raised her. _She's_ next. Not Caroline, oh no, not her. But Liz. The strongest person that she knows, not physically, but with a will of steel. She's next, taken down by an emotionless, pathetic immortal.

Klaus takes her and beheads her, with a sword and everything that he probably used in a duel in the 1500s in Venice or something. She can't bother to care about where the sword came from or what it was used to do.

_But it has her mother's blood on it, and it hurts so much, so much, oh GOD it hurts!_

For the first time, she really truly cries.

Damon touches her lightly, unable to really soothe, but she doesn't give a damn, not anymore. Klaus picks up Liz's head by the blond hair—the hair that Caroline inherited, the one thing that she never dyed or changed because it's a piece of her mom that she hasn't changed about herself, and, oh, it pains her so—and dangles it in front of the bars.

She snarls and somehow finds herself pinned up against the bars, clinging and howling and screaming and begging and promising pain to this beast of a man.

Klaus just laughs.

* * *

Damon. Poor, poor Damon.

She doesn't know why she has to be last. Is it because Klaus pursued her, and she denied him? Is it because she chose Tyler, and not him? Is it because she's the easiest to pick on, the one with connections to everyone? Bonnie and Elena were her friends. Jeremy was like her little brother. Stefan was her mentor. Liz was her _mother_, for God's sake.

And Damon is the man who introduced her to all of this. He abused her, yes, but he's her sire. He gave her the blood that allowed her immortality. He saved her from being sacrificed. He took Tyler's bite for her. He's saved her from being killed almost every single time that she was captured—and damn, that's a lot of times, now that she thinks about it. She has a tendency for being kidnapped.

Damon looks her in the eyes and Klaus leads them upstairs, both of them chained with links soaked in vervain. She doesn't know why they're being taken upstairs, but they follow obediently. (If they don't, he just stabs them with a stake he keeps handy in one hand, the other leading them up the stairs behind him.) They're side by side, her and Damon, and their eyes connect as they go up the stairs, light azure on midnight cobalt.

He takes them outside, too. The light hurts her overly-sensitive eyes, accustomed to weeks of weak lighting, and even Damon winces. Klaus just smirks cockily, as usual.

He disconnects their chains, but they're too weak to run. She's sure her face is sunken in, and the veins are visible, but Damon still looks perfect, as always. She stares into his eyes. God, this hurts, knowing he must be next, knowing by the way that Klaus laughs at him just a little bit.

Then Klaus takes off his ring, and Damon burns. It's quiet as his skin blisters, until Caroline murmurs a final, "I'm sorry, Damon," and he whispers back, "I am, too." And she knows that he means it, and he knows she does, as well.

And then he's gone, a pile of ashes, and there's so much pain inside of her now that she can barely register the fact that she's _alone_ with Klaus.

* * *

Klaus takes her back to the house he's hiding out in, showing her the living room. There's a deer carcass and a human tied up side by side. The girl is still alive, wide eyed and terrified and her screams muffled by the gag thrust into her mouth by an annoyed Klaus.

"Take your pick. Choose," he says, and she thinks for just a second.

She lunges at the deer, sucking at the open wound on its neck greedily.

Klaus sighs, takes the girl into his arms and prepares to compel her into forgetting and deliver her back to her home. And Caroline knows with a sinking certainty that he'll kill her after he comes home, because he doesn't want anything that he considers weak.

And she wishes he would kill her. She wants death. But dammit, she's so hungry that she can't control her mouth.

"Come here," she says, her words choked by the blood in her mouth. And he returns, the girl still in his arms. She can't control herself, and she dives at the human.

Klaus smiles as she sucks the girl dry.

* * *

She lives with him. They travel. Paris, Rome, London, Tokyo. She hates herself. She hates him. She hates it all.

He doesn't grow on her. Not all. His smirks, his cockiness—they remind her of Damon. His genuine kindness to her that she doesn't understand—Elena, Bonnie, Stefan. His playfulness—Jeremy. His protectiveness—Liz and Tyler. His stubbornness—all of them.

So the day that they travel to Nashville—he wants to discover the true value of country music, which he admits that he's never heard when she asks on the plane ride there from Belgium—they're walking in a cemetery, the day particularly sunny, and she looks at him. It all comes bursting out.

"You say that you like me."

"I do," he says, calmly and expressionlessly. They both know it, but she needs confirmation in order to be able to do what she's been wanting to do for a year, goddamnit.

She tsks. "You know, Jeremy Gilbert had a crush on me. Before he started going out with Bonnie. Before you set him on fire.

"And Damon—god, Damon, we used to go out. I've never experienced passion like that. He was the first guy that I really loved, I guess, even if it was all mostly lies. There were those moments...those moments where I was sure that he loved me, and maybe he did. I know that I loved him.

"Tyler loved me. God, he loved me. And I loved him too. He was my…my comfortable guy. It was so damn _easy _with him. And Stefan—he was like my brother. We loved each other like siblings. And mom. She loved me. I loved her. They were all my _family_. Bonnie and Elena—my best friends."

His eyes reveal nothing.

"Now you're gonna know what it's like to lose someone you actually care about," she hisses at him, and pulls her ring off of her finger.

As she burns alive, his horrified expression only telling her that she was right that he actually does care, she smiles. Now he'll know.

After all, she has nothing left to live for.

* * *

A/N: Um, yeah. Review? *hopeful expression*


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